News feminist philosophers can use

I Need Masculinism Because…

A hashtag is making the rounds again after it cropped up last month; I’m surprised I didn’t post about it back then. (Then again, with our new blog format, I have to learn how to re-navigate the whole site. Grrr.)

After some Reddit/4chan MRA babies tried to make #INeedMasculismBecause happen on Twitter today (co-opting the popular feminist meme, because EYEROLL), it blew up in their faces bigtime. The hashtag was gleefully hijacked by the normal, thinking humans of Twitter, who are currently churning out hundreds of tweets lampooning Men’s Rights talking points. I had to scroll down for years to find one sincere #INeedMasculismBecause tweet from an MRA. (And when you do find them, they read like parody anyway.) It’s pretty awesome.

2 thoughts on “I Need Masculinism Because…”

Patriarchy is the problem, no doubt about it. As the gender roles develop and reproduce, men (yes, still the privileged gender) find it harder and harder to accommodate to new scenarios while unable to detach themselves from the typical old masculinity paradigm.
While women mainly claim for more equality, it seems to me that men (those advocating masculinism anyway) claim for more freedom of expression. The other day I watched Ellen Degeneres saying that women are living a great age “…we are allowed to vote, we are allowed to wear pants….” Well, when will men be allowed to wear leggins or skirts or dye their hair in any tone and colour they want, etc, etc, etc, without being called gay. And at that, when will calling someone gay stop being demeaning?
Men are trapped in a very narrow and rigid paradigm of self-presentation in the everyday. Moreover, the acceptable gender role of men is more rigid today than it is of women. A woman can work (equality of payment and opportunity of progress aside), be a waitress or assistant of executive or business owner or CEO, but a man who is not a typical ‘provider’, a stay-home dad for instance, is often seen as a pariah -not so much by other men as by women! So, yes, in my view, masculinism is a good thing.
Last month I read Kaitlyn Moran’s How to be a Woman, and while I enjoyed the reading and agree with most of her ideas, I couldn’t help but notice that many of the ‘hard’ experiences of becoming a woman apply just the same to becoming a man. It is time to stop thinking in terms of gender at all. A person is not good or bad, intelligent or stupid because of her gender. I’m all up for radical individualism.